This article discusses all seven episodes of Netflix's East of Eden.
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article → discuss → Eden
When John Steinbeck published East of Eden, a top contender for Great American Novel, in 1952, the response to its primary female character, Cathy Ames, was effectively unanimous.
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response → publish → character
Whether they admired or deplored Steinbeck’s portrayal of her, midcentury critics judged Cathy to be pure evil, a veritable Satan in stockings.
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Cathy → admire → stockings
Male reviewers, which is to say just about all reviewers, disagreed only on the magnitude of her repugnance; while this publication deemed her a “vicious slut,” the New York Times crowned her the “most vicious female in literature.”
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her → say → literature
She drives a man to suicide and kills her parents while still a teen.
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She → drive → parents
She sleeps with her new husband’s brother, gives birth to twins, and promptly abandons them, gravely injuring her shocked spouse as she escapes.
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she → sleep → spouse
Then she ensconces herself at a brothel, kisses up to the madam, fatally poisons the lonely woman once she has willed Cathy her fortune.
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she → ensconce → fortune
It’s hard to imagine a character with this rap sheet as anything short of a psychopath.
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It → ’ → psychopath
But here’s a thought experiment, one I often found myself running as I read the great novel and watched Zoe Kazan’s insightful Netflix adaptation: What if Cathy, born into the prison of 19th century womanhood, had behaved less viciously in any of the above situations?
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Cathy → ’ → situations
She might’ve prevented an adult man’s suicide—but only by becoming his child bride.
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She → prevent → bride
She didn’t have to murder her parents—but if she hadn’t, her father would have kept beating her at the slightest provocation.
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father → have → provocation
She could have fled from her husband-to-be before the marriage, the infidelity, the pregnancy, the gunshot—but she would have been a wounded and destitute and potentially wanted woman, with nowhere to go and doom all but certain.
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she → flee → marriage
In other words: Cathy might not have acted much differently if, instead of personifying evil, she were chasing freedom at any cost.
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she → act → cost
Kazan’s seven-episode series proceeds as if this were the case.
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this → proceed → ?
It’s a feminist project, in that it takes for granted that a character who happens to be a woman should be given the same humanity as one who happens to be a man.
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who → ’ → one
And despite its allegorical nature, with two generations of brothers reenacting the tragedy of Cain and Abel, East of Eden is a book that grants even minor characters unique personalities and preoccupations, good qualities and bad.
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that → reenact → personalities
By now, we’re used to seeing female villains like Cruella de Vil and Nurse Ratched glibly issued trauma-plot backstories and wardrobes that slay and rebranded as meme-worthy badass antiheroes.
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that → ’re → antiheroes
What makes Kazan’s Cathy refreshing—and Florence Pugh’s mesmerizingly self-possessed performance so moving—is that the character is so firmly grounded in Steinbeck’s Cathy.
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character → make → Cathy
“I think the text supports my reading,” the creator recently told TIME, and that wasn’t false bravado.
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that → think → TIME
She saw no need to invent explanations for Cathy’s ghastly behavior because they were already abundant in the original text.
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they → see → text
Kazan also evidently understood that to do Cathy justice is not to vindicate or forgive her; it’s to make sure we genuinely see her.
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we → understand → her
This is the symbolic as well as the literal effect of the series’ opening scene, which replaces Steinbeck’s patient California scene-setting with a flash-forward to a crucial moment that comes significantly later in the chronology.
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that → replace → chronology
The night sky is so black, it takes a second to perceive Pugh’s brutally beaten and whimpering Cathy crawling on her belly towards the farmhouse where her arrival will change lives for generations to come.
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arrival → take → generations
“I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents,” she intones in a voiceover.
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she → believe → voiceover
Still, you must not forget, everyone is normal to himself.
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everyone → forget → himself
And to a monster, the norm must seem monstrous.”
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norm → seem → monster
These ideas, and most of the language itself, come straight from Steinbeck’s introduction of Cathy.
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ideas → come → Cathy
Kazan’s departure is to put them in her mouth, rather than that of a narrator who resembles the author.
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who → put → author
In their original context, but even more so in the new one, they suggest a lack of malice on the monster’s part.
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they → suggest → part
Can you blame someone for being the only thing she could possibly have been?
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she → blame → someone
The scene also gets viewers used to seeing through Cathy’s eyes, before the premiere backtracks through the lives of rival brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist) up until her appearance at their Connecticut farm.
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premiere → get → farm
In our earliest glimpse of Cathy, she’s a precocious five-year-old paging through Alice in Wonderland and looking quite a bit like classic illustrations of Alice when an older boy’s outstretched hands offer her candy if she’ll follow him into the woods.
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she → ’ → woods
(Alice author Lewis Carroll’s biography adds its own dark resonance to the scene.)
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biography → add → scene
It’s her choice to run after the sweets; running after sweets is fundamental to her nature.
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running → ’ → nature
But isn’t it tragic that Cathy’s Eve-and-the-apple moment comes so early in life, and that the implied (then, much later in the series, confirmed) consequence of her decision is a sexual assault that cements her misanthropic worldview?
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that → come → worldview
Pugh told Vanity Fair it was this scene, modified somewhat from an incident in the book where a slightly older Cathy is supposed to have led boys into sin, that drew her to the role: “I thought it was the most beautiful love letter to protecting her as a child.
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it → tell → child
When I read that, I was like, ‘I can get behind her.’
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I → read → her
Because I can’t imagine for a moment after that abuse that she’ll ever be the same person again.”
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she → imagine → abuse
Indeed, as she develops more agency, her choices become more selfish and violent.
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choices → develop → agency
What the schoolteacher (who in our time would be considered an abuser) and her parents have in common is that they try to possess her, to constrict her freedom—a nightmare for any person, but especially for someone whose bodily sovereignty was violated in childhood.
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sovereignty → consider → childhood
…and 44 more, not listed.
The Aporia
